1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to dynamic automatic speech recognition (ASR), and, in particular, to a system and method for dynamically altering ASR operation based upon information mined from social networking sources.
2. Description of Related Art
Contact centers generally exchange information with consumers through directed contacts. Directed contacts consist of emails, phone calls, or other forms of communication that are directed to the contact center or the consumer. However, many people today exchange information or interact through non-direct methods. Non-direct communications require users to post communications to third party sites or forums, but not to direct those communications to a specific person or organization. Non-direct communication methods include social media, which may include websites, networks, blogs, micro-blogs, RSS feeds, social media websites (such as, LinkedIn®, Facebook®, Twitter®, MySpace®, etc.), and other types of social media.
Consumers are finding it useful to ask their questions, complain about service, and compliment companies in the public forum of social media. Social media is often a “canary in a coal mine” (i.e., an early indicator) for possible service-affecting events because social media users typically express themselves on social media channels before using traditional channels like voice. The addition of social media to valid contact center channels increases the overall coverage required by today's contact center. However, contact centers have limited amounts of resources. The burden of keeping other, traditionally static, contact center self-service channels current, efficient, and useful becomes a difficult problem. Therefore, traditional contact centers do not react to trends in social media that duplicate trends from other channels like voice dialog via interactive voice response (IVR). Delays in addressing a customer crisis results in lost time and money for a business.
Therefore, a need exists to adapt speech grammars recognized by contact center channels, based on real-time trending events detected from social media, in order to provide high customer satisfaction, efficient call handling, and minimizing the burden on today's contact center resources.